Comment by jacquesm

Comment by jacquesm 7 hours ago

10 replies

How about: you get to say whether you want to update and when and manufacturers are required to very explicitly list all of the changes in an update? That would seem to be an acceptable minimum.

pavel_lishin 5 hours ago

I don't think that Jeep would have sent out a message saying that one of the changes would brick your machine.

It seems that the ability to trivially roll back any update would be a better choice, at least for this. (But I'm sure there are downstream effects I haven't thought about if that were implemented.)

  • conductr 4 hours ago

    How do you roll back a fatal car accident caused by the faulty update?

    Giving user’s control over when the update runs allows them to be in a safe and secure setting when that update happens. Allowing them time, gives them and Jeep the ability to slow roll the update so they can halt it if initial feedback is negative.

    I say this as a Mac user who does not allow auto updates for MacOS. I wait a week or so until the chatter validates it as non-breaking. They pushed an OS update several years ago that broke a few things I rely on. So I don’t trust them now, but these things just happen on OS’s with third party software. I expect it. But, I also don’t want to be forced to deal with the headaches immediately. I’d rather let the third parties run updates and advise how to deal, before I have to dive into fixing things. With car firmware, there’s really no excuse for this except poor engineering / processes.

    • throwway120385 9 minutes ago

      > Giving user’s control over when the update runs allows them to be in a safe and secure setting when that update happens. Allowing them time, gives them and Jeep the ability to slow roll the update so they can halt it if initial feedback is negative.

      This does not fix any QA process that is broken. And frankly you should not need to update any control unit firmware after it is sold. The fact that they're even doing this is broken.

      Unless your Mac is somehow attached to 5000 pounds of metal going 65 on the highway, the same standards should probably not apply.

    • tremon 4 hours ago

      Giving user’s control over when the update runs allows them to be in a safe and secure setting when that update happens

      FTFA:

      > The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving — a far more serious problem

      And from the GP upthread:

      > There is no way to tell if you received the bad update.

      > There is no way to tell if you received the 'fix' either.

      • conductr 3 hours ago

        Good points, I did miss those. However, if I had this vehicle and I was reading this article today - and had the ability I'm asking for - I would just keep my current version running until they figure this mess out. It's the advantage of letting other people run the updates first, you get to hear about issues before you experience them.

    • deepsun an hour ago

      > user who does not allow auto updates for MacOS.

      Many security compliances require auto-updates to be on. It's thought of to be a lesser evil, because many (most) users never update their OS/browsers, which is worse.

  • rurp 3 hours ago

    It's not perfect but seems reasonably easy to implement and would certainly help. If the user needs to approve each update and can see what the changes are most updates will either be skipped or delayed long enough that catastrophic bugs will only hit the small subset of cars that update immediately.

    I would bet most updates, especially from a company this bumbling, will be more along the lines of increasing telemetry or pointless UI changes than releasing actually useful features and bug fixes.

  • danielheath 3 hours ago

    You might not accept an update with a bunch of changes that didn’t sound relevant to you.

    I certainly wouldn’t accept one while I was still driving the car!

    • skywhopper 3 hours ago

      The update didn’t happen while people were driving. Rather, the bug took time to occur, well after the update had been applied.